For those who take ABC’s The Bachelor to be more than an organized human circus, based loosely on the notion of true love, Monday’s finale episode ended satisfactorily. Chris Soules, this season’s Bachelor, ultimately chose Whitney over Becca. On its face, it seemed a wise decision. Chris’s stated reason for taking part in the program (and The Bachelorette previously) was to find a wife. Whitney is nothing if not apparently ready to be just that—and for all the things they both assume will come with it (read: babies).

Ultimately, and despite Chris’s apparent inner turmoil about his choice, his proposal to Whitney wasn’t a major surprise; the surprise really would have been if he’d chosen Becca. The real surprise of the evening was Chris Harrison’s announcement that both Britt and Kaitlyn will feature in the upcoming Bachelorette season. How? The details were slight, but it seems the two will be presented to the men initially, and it will be up to the guys to pick which woman carries on as the ultimate Bachelorette.

This somewhat confusing twist had its immediate doubters online, and sparked a line of thinking that the move was sexist. This sprang initially from a former Bachelor. Sean Lowe wrote on his blog that the conceit is “downright degrading for the women—for the two chosen and the women watching at home.” How, exactly? “This move transfers the power back to the men on the show specifically designed for the women. As one tweet said, ‘Once again, you’ll have women competing for the attention of men.’ ”

Lowe touches on a crucial element of the show(s): power. This is a constant underlying facet of this program and its various iterations. Who holds the power? Is it the Bachelor/Bachelorette? Is it the contestants?

In writing on The Bachelor Canada, a question on this arose. Has it occurred to contestants that they have just as much a job to perform on this show as the Bachelor or Bachelorette does? Is it not true that they are fully capable of acting on their own accord? The Bachelor or Bachelorette may want a particular guy or girl, but what if the feeling isn’t reciprocated? That is, it’s always assumed that the contestants are vying for the Bachelor or Bachelorette’s attention. The opposite can—or should—be equally true.

Becca offered a glimpse into it this season. Toward the end, she was billed as elusive—perhaps even hard-to-get. When Chris’s mother dug a bit deeper, however, it was revealed that Becca was simply confused, and therefore aloof. But what was interesting was to see her consider whether she really wanted to go through with the whole thing. It was not presented as a question of her life goals, generally; it was instead presented as a question of whether her goals aligned enough with Chris’s, and whether he would deign them suitable for his life. In other words, she was presented as being quite powerless—at the whim and fancy of the man.

Does that powerlessness disappear in The Bachelorette? No. It can’t, because the underlying framework of the program is exactly the same, and its concern is always to have two people get engaged—period. So whether it’s a Bachelorette or Bachelor, the program works to ultimately form a traditional heterosexual relationship, and operates mostly by reinforcing normative gender roles to get there. All the men are lantern-jawed and muscular; the women are shown dabbing makeup, or are treated to a “princess” date. The show spends a lot of time focusing on traditional “manly” and “womanly” features and, more often than not, on those that are purely physical. As such, the power dynamic is immediately assumed throughout—the women have less. That somehow having The Bachelorette changes this is flawed thinking. Fundamentally, it’s the same show.

(Total belief in the worldview presented by The Bachelor franchises is perhaps what led Lowe to speculate that having two Bachelorettes is “degrading . . . to the women at home.” It’s quite the statement, in that it assumes what would have to be a startlingly passive female audience at home who experience agency only via proxy—by watching a program on television wherein a woman has been placed in the spot of Main Character.)

All of that is not to say we can’t enjoy the entertainment of the drama and whatnot that comes from this particular power dynamic. But we should be honest about what it is; let’s not fool ourselves that anyone here is making great strides toward destroying sexism. Is having two Bachelorettes sexist? Yes, but probably only slightly more sexist than everything else on the show, which is already pretty sexist.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/television/is-having-two-bachelorettes-sexist/feed/0The curious case of The Bachelor’s Ashley S.http://www.macleans.ca/culture/television/the-curious-case-of-the-bachelors-ashley-s/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/television/the-curious-case-of-the-bachelors-ashley-s/#commentsWed, 04 Mar 2015 19:38:33 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=687769Ashley S. is absurd—but then again, so is the entire Bachelor enterprise. Why the show does not want us asking too many questions.

Among the subplots on ABC’s The Bachelor this season, none has been so vexing as the curious tale of Ashley S.

From the first night onward, Ashley S. behaved strangely. Most notably—and something about which the program reminded viewers again on Monday night during the Women Tell All evening—was her discovery, on the first evening, of a pomegranate hanging from a tree. Facing the camera for a confessional, she became distracted by the fruit and, apparently thinking it was an onion, left the frame to explore further.

In subsequent episodes, she: speculated that an angel would receive the rose; disappeared from sight, only to return and claim that she’d “heard the truth . . . that’s all I mean, that’s how I feel, it’s like, boom”; declared that she “wrote on my bucket list this new idea of sunflower fields. Like, I just want to run through the sunflower seeds”; and told Chris, “You don’t want to lose the whole world. But actually, you don’t want to gain the whole world. You don’t want to lose your soul.” Ashley S. also concluded that, behind the scenes, the producers of The Bachelor were actively betting on the outcome of the program.

Weirdest of all was her behaviour when the group went to an outdoor paintball range. “It’s like Mesa Verde,” she seethed, pointing her gun at the camera, eyes wide. Kaitlyn later told the cameras: “I am here to tell everybody that Ashley is full-blown the crazy girl on The Bachelor.”

One would imagine that if it were true, however, everyone ought to have been a lot more concerned. Some were, of course, though apparently nobody who worked for the program. Elle.com, for instance, asked whether it was “wrong to keep crazy Ashley on The Bachelor.” (This kind of reaction played to exactly the stereotype the show was attempting to create while, ostensibly, decrying the same for its insensitivity.)

Still, the question (though flawed) was nearly right: If Ashley S. was indeed mentally ill, what on Earth was she doing on this program? Moreover, how were we to interpret the way she was treated? Rather than explore her issues, The Bachelor played them up for comic effect. Was this the way to treat mental illness? We all tut-tutted.

So when Monday night rolled around, and Ashley S. was given a platform to discuss her time on the program, there was likely some hope among many Bachelor viewers that we’d find out the truth. Was she an actor? Was she going through some kind of emotional stress during filming? Did she have a previously undiagnosed disorder? Was she on drugs?

Er, none of the above, apparently. Or, more accurately: We still don’t know.

When she walked up to the couches to have a chat with host Chris Harrison, Ashley brought with her an onion as a gift for him—har har. But rather than provide any insight into what was going on during her time on the show, Ashley S. just kept acting weird, much to the delight of the other contestants and the live audience.

Harrison asked her why she thought there was a betting pool going on behind the scenes, which, he clarified, had been the show’s accountants at work. “I was so bored, honestly, and I was just like, ‘I’m gonna go explore,’ ” she replied. “Finding a secret betting pool, even an imaginary one, is way more fun than finding some accounting, no matter how old you are.”

Harrison asked her who the real Ashley S. is. “I like to ride bikes, and I mean, this is me,” she told him. “I think, with the cameras around, it’s really hard for me to not be silly. So while all of them were getting upset and crying, I was outside picking pomegranates.”

When, finally, Harrison invited her to appear on The Bachelor in Paradise—a program set up to invite even more fantastical behaviour than the regular show—Ashley S. didn’t directly respond. Instead, she simply noted that it was “weird . . . that we’re all on TV.”

It’s difficult, as a viewer, to know what to make of all this. Is there a moral quandary here? Should we feel guilty about any part of this? Are we being duped? Or is something else going on entirely?

Fans of shows like this tend to take it on good faith that producers, while intent on running entertaining programming and pushing various psychological limits to that end, aren’t out to specifically exploit very serious, perhaps deep-seated, issues. Things like death are often handled tastefully (such as when a former Bachelorette contestant died between filming and airing). In lesser instances, we can usually expect some kind of “awareness” message, where the highlighted problem becomes a way to market the show itself, under the guise of helping people everywhere.

And while there are a number of issues with that approach, it can usually at least help viewers absolve themselves of any guilt they might feel. We like to be voyeurs, but not if it’s too obvious that we’re voyeurs and, particularly, if what we’re seeing makes us feel uncomfortable. Show runners and producers know this, especially on The Bachelor, a show dedicated entirely to reinforcing very standard, conservative ideas about security. To have us feel uncomfortable for too long goes entirely against the show’s ethos.

This is about where Ashley S. starts to become interesting, rather than simply strange, because it’s through this lens of comfort and fairy tale that The Bachelor was forced to frame her.

Usually in these situations, producers play to type, which is why everyone understood Kaitlyn’s classification of Ashley as “the crazy girl on The Bachelor.” They construct this trope all the time, even when there’s really nothing going on. It makes for good drama, but what it really does, in the end, is reinforce the main message that there is order in the universe. Even the somewhat strange can be categorized: they are “crazy.”

Which is what The Bachelor tried again with Ashley S.—except it didn’t work. We were uncomfortable, no matter how many times the show brushed her off as just another kooky nutbar not there for the right reasons, but worth having around to laugh at.

It didn’t work this time, because Ashley S. wasn’t merely weird; she was absurd. And absurdity is something entirely different, and very rarely something we watch at 8 p.m. on a main network for a couple of hours on Monday night. It lives elsewhere. It doesn’t belong in The Bachelor universe.

The great thing about it, though, is that however it came (again, we don’t know the answer), when it arrived via Ashley S., it broke the structure of the program entirely. The Bachelor is not equipped for this kind of thing, because the result of having a rogue, absurdist, element like Ashley S. around isn’t us wondering if she’s crazy; we end up wondering if we’re crazy.

The only logical question to come from watching Ashley S. was: What is this? This question is poison to The Bachelor, and it’s why the show tried so hard to make Ashley a joke; they even took time out of a special one-on-one with Chris halfway through the season to watch a highlight reel of her bizarro outtakes. The question of what, exactly, this is that we’re watching undermines The Bachelor entirely. As soon as we start asking it about one aspect of the show, we could end up asking it about every single other one, too—starting with the very premise of the thing.

So, yes, Ashley S. might be strange, but in what context? Everything about this show is strange. Ashley S. is right: It is weird that this is on TV. It’s nice that someone finally pointed it out.

After eight weeks of roses, revelations, and Ray Bans, the Maclean’s Bachelor Panel had a few burning questions about the people and the process behind Canada’s very first Bachelor series. Sonya Bell put them to the happy couple themselves, Brad and Bianka. Here’s the full interview, edited for clarity, but including Brad’s every use of “douchebag.”

Sonya: Guys, my first and most serious question is: what do you do for dates now that you don’t have access to a private jet or even a helicopter?

Brad: Oh, geez. She’s slowly realizing that she’s slipping into the mediocre circle of – she’s going to get Wendy’s, a ’93 Corolla, and possibly, possibly have to settle for matinee Tuesdays to save six bucks on movies.

Bianka: We’re so easygoing. I ask him, do you want to go out for dinner tonight? And he’s like, let’s just go back home, put our pjs on, and crash on the couch. And I’m like, deal.

Sonya: Going back to the beginning. Had either of you watched the Bachelor series before? Or did you do so for research purposes before you started?

Bianka: I used to watch it before, I think in the first four years that it was on, and then I kind of got tied up with work, and I didn’t have so much time for TV. But I was always a fan of it.

Brad: I wanted to see, personally, what kind of level of douchebaggery I was getting myself into.

Sonya: What did you conclude?

Brad: I’m up there with one of the bigger ones.

Sonya: Did you take away any tips from what you had seen?

Brad: Yeah, how not to act. I mean, I wanted to be myself, I wanted to be genuine.

Sonya: Bianka, I read on your Bachelor blog that signing up for the Bachelor Canada was sort of a why-not lark. But having dated a public figure [Kris Humphries], and watched him go on to become a sort of cautionary tale on reality television, why sign up for a reality show yourself?

Bianka: You can’t even compare what they [Kris Humphries and Kim Kardashian] went through to what we have. There’s not even a comparison.

Brad: Yeah, but she’s asking about the initial want to do it.

Bianka: Um. God, I was so hesitant up until the day that I left. But you know, I went for the experience and the hope that they would have a great guy there and you know, if there was a connection, great. And if not, then at least I gave it a shot.

Sonya: Why didn’t we see you on the bachelorette tell-all episode?

Bianka: Just because normally they don’t have the last two women come out. But they made an exception for Whitney, just because of…

Brad: She’s so polarizing.

Bianka: Yeah, and there’s a lot of girls who had unanswered question.

Sonya: Are you staying in touch with anyone from the show, or would that be weird?

Bianka: No, I developed real friendships in the house with the other girls, just because we spent so much time. I have a soft spot for Ana, Nicole, Laura B. and Chantelle, that were really good, genuine girls.

Sonya: And Brad?

Brad: Am I? No, I’ve got my girl.

Sonya: Still on Brad right now. You’ve been in our living rooms for the past eight weeks, but there’s still some very basic things we don’t know about you. What do you do for a living?

Brad: Well, before I was on The Bachelor I legitimately ended my last season with Edmonton. So I was going to go back and play football, but The Bachelor offered me a great segue. But outside of that, I do have a private life, and that’s the best part about it, is I’ll be fine for myself.

Sonya: Okay, so, you are not revealing what you do for a living?

Brad: Nope. I can easily say things that would make me sound like a bigger douche than I already am, but for me my purpose right now is getting to have a relationship in public with the girl of my dreams. And that’s my focus right now.

Sonya: Is football on the table, or off the table?

Brad: Off the table. I would never put B through that kind of situation, where you have to watch, and it’s really an emotional roller-coaster, especially with injuries and stuff, and getting traded, and uprooting her life. It’s a part of my life that I gladly left behind to do something like find Bianka.

Sonya: What’s it been like watching the series? Here, I have an analogy. Is it at all, for you as an athlete, like watching game tape and seeing all the things you did wrong?

Brad: Yeah, you can equate it to that. I don’t know if I would go as far as saying all the things I did wrong. I think I acted as appropriate as I could, given the situation I was under. I don’t regret any of the decisions I made because it led me to the spot where I’m sitting here with B talking to you, you know?

Sonya: Did viewers see a different Whitney than you saw? You kept her around several episodes longer than people might have expected.

Brad: Put it this way. B was Bianka, I was myself, and Whitney was herself, and we were all portrayed in different ways. But in saying that, never did the producers come up to me and say keep this person here, or don’t, or told any of the girls to say anything, or say you like Brad, or say you love him. So everything that was said on that show was uniquely said by the people who said them.

Sonya: I thought I did read somewhere else though, that you did keep Bianka around a little bit longer on the advice of a producer.

Brad: A producer who’s one of my good friends right now. Bianka’s method of getting to know me was making me come and talk to her, which at the time, when there’s so many girls, was so tough, that I didn’t think she wanted to be there. So when I said, when we made a list from 16 to 12, she was 13. And this is a guy who had done my backstory and everything, and been in the casting process, he said, you know, I just have a feeling about her. He was invited to our party last night as the saviour.

Sonya: The final two that you had with you, Whitney and Bianka, they were the two that you had identified fairly early on as being kind of emotionally withdrawn. I’m wondering, as someone who really emphasized communication throughout the whole series, what attracted you to that quality?

Brad: No. That was said on a television show. Was Bianka emotionally withdrawn in real life? No. Not whatsoever. The most substantial conversations I had with anyone were from Mexico on with Bianka. I wouldn’t just go on physical desires. I made sure I asked and did every single thing I could with every single person, and iIf they didn’t show that, that’s not my fault.

Sonya: So going forward, are you guys planning to get married soon, do you want to take your time? We know there’s a low rate of long-term success of Bachelor couples.

Brad: Yeah, but there’s zero per cent proof that it wouldn’t work on the Canadian edition, you know?

Bianka: We would like to do it sooner than later. We don’t have a date set just because we were able to share all the news with our family and friends yesterday. So it’s definitely going to be in the talks.

Brad: You can take this as genuine as you want, but I’ll go outside right now and marry this girl.

Sonya: Falling in love on a reality TV show – it’s a deeply personal experience, and you’re sharing it with lights and cameras and I imagine that was a bit much, psychologically. Would you recommend that others looking for love sign up for next season?

Brad: I recommend that the guy that they pick, he should try to act the same way I did, which was be serious towards it.

Sonya: And Bianka? Would you recommend that other women do it?

Bianka: I would say to do it if you’re true to yourself, and you can handle, you know, being in that situation. Seeing the one guy you’re dating date several other women.

Brad: You just have to be secure. And that’s the toughest spot to ever be secure in.

Sonya: Okay, that’s all. I appreciate your time.

Brad: Amazing.

Bianka: Thank you!

There’s still one more episode of the Bachelor Canada next week, which the Maclean’s panel will duly weigh in on. “After The Final Rose” airs Wednesday, Nov. 28 at 9:30 p.m. ET/PT (8 MT/8:30 CT) on Citytv.

It’s all fun and games until Canada’s Prince Charming turns into a toad.

Bachelor Brad Smith, who has espoused the virtues of commitment and communication for weeks now, handed roses to the exact two girls he has identified as being emotionally closed off and perhaps not ready for a serious relationship: Whitney and Bianka.

Kara, my mascara streams down my cheeks with yours.

It’s safe to say most viewers went into this week’s episode expecting that after Whitney’s cold and calculating side was exposed during the home visits last week, she was going to be the one sent packing Wednesday night. (Well played, you crafty reality TV producers you, well played.) Exactly no one was going to miss her. That included, it seemed, Brad: “I can’t be with someone who’s emotionally repressed and that’s what I get from her.”

So I let my guard down. I watched “the most amazing fantasy dates ever” transpire in the Maritimes to Celtic music, secure in the knowledge that the only real heart that would break this episode would be New Brunswick’s. (There were three dates in three Atlantic provinces. You know which ones were chosen.)

But this episode took a turn for the weird, fast. I’m talking, of course, about the high-stakes overnight dates in “fantasy suites” that followed the regular one-on-one outings. All three girls said yes to Brad’s proposal, though well aware that the invitation was being extended to a different girl in a different province the next night. The Bachelor Canada: a little like a swingers party. A very one-sided swingers party.

Perhaps Aaron can tell us a bit about how the overnight dates play out on the American series. My key question: Has a bachelorette ever failed to receive a rose, then revealed that she’s pregnant? Would the show have you sign a waiver on that?

Part of the reason I’m feeling so sore over this episode is, of course, that I had both called Brad as being a nice guy and predicted he would ultimately choose Kara. Going forward, I just don’t know what to think, and what to make of Brad–is he secretly intimidated by the idea of a woman saying “yes” at the end of this? As it becomes more and more clear that Whitney just isn’t that into him, is he getting caught up in the thrill of the chase?

“I still believe that I could be the guy for her,” he told the cameras.

The only thing keeping me going at this point is the promise of a reappearance by Senator Larry Smith, Brad’s dad, when the two remaining girls meet his family later on.

Because Brad, man. You’ve changed.

From: AaronTo: Sonya, Colin

My favourite part of every Bachelor season is the arrival of the “fantasy suite” invitations, when the remaining contestants are presented with the opportunity to spend a night “as a couple” with the Bachelor or Bachelorette. Basically it’s like presenting a member of the opposite sex with a card that says “Would you like to have sex with me right now? Check yes or no.” In this case, it seemed Brad could barely contain his boyish glee as each of the ladies read their respective cards.

For the most part the sexy time is only alluded to: awkward giggles, rose pedals on the bed, then cut to exterior shot of the bedroom light going off. But this time Bianka—once again daring to challenge the show’s reality—confronted the weirdness, confessing that she was a bit uncomfortable spending the night with a gentleman who was about to spend the two subsequent nights with two other women. (In the ensuing debate, Brad somehow thought it would help to tell her that the other women were totally okay with it.) After a few uncomfortable moments during which it seemed he might cry, she came around and decided to spend the night. I think I’m supposed to high-five him here, but I don’t know the emoticon for that.

So far as I know, Sonya, no one’s ever ended up pregnant as a result of a night in the fantasy suite. I imagine there are producers and lawyers and signed agreements involved in ensuring all precautions are taken. In fact, I’m going to go ahead and assume there’s a producer in the bed with the couple the entire night to ensure all protocols are followed.

Presumably, one way or the other, Brad didn’t sleep much this week. Or he’s been hypnotized by Whitney’s eyebrows. Or he’s been hypnotized by Whitney’s boobs. Whatever the case, his decision to send Kara home seemed shockingly dumb. Not least because the producers had spent the previous hour trying to convince the viewer that Kara was obviously and resoundingly the girl for Brad. Maybe this was meant to make the end of this episode a surprise. Or maybe this was meant to make us think Brad is an idiot. I’m reminded of Brad’s comments about there being a difference between what’s going on and what we see. But this was a wholly weird ending: punctuated by Whitney’s post-rose interjection that she needed to talk to Brad. Though she privately confessed to not being sure that she and Brad were meant to be together, once she had an opportunity to talk to him, she didn’t seem to have anything to say. And, er, that was that.

So it’s all a bit of a mess at this point, I think. Which ss maybe as it is supposed to be.

From: ColinTo: Sonya, Aaron

A fine mess, indeed. But maybe this is what we should have expected after Brad started the whole week off with the lofty proclamation that “I hope the Maritimes help me find the person I’m going to be with for the rest of my life.” It’s up to you, Eastern Canada! No pressure. Oh wait, I meant ALL OF THE PRESSURE.

There was some pretty sage advice handed out near the end of this week’s episode by way of a cross-country telephone call. Whitney, who suddenly had cold feet about, well, everything, called her sister Camille in Calgary (it was unclear whether she talked to her dad) and fretted that should she be the one left standing after that evening’s rose ceremony, she might not be actually capable of going through with it. Camille replied it would probably be unfair to go on with things – unfair to Brad, unfair to herself. “Follow your heart, it might not be the easiest but it’s probably the best,” she said.

Yes, exactly. Isn’t that what this whole show is about, fundamentally?

I find it interesting that it’s becoming increasingly clear that the majority of those remaining in the final weeks are totally incapable of following that logic, even though it’s technically what they’re all here to do. Brad in particular is becoming an insufferable hypocrite, droning on and on about how he really just needs a gal who’ll, y’know, be open about her emotions and stuff because, like, that’s what he really needs after shutting himself down and all that. And yet, curiously, he has decided to keep the two girls who are least capable of showing off any of those attributes, even when he’s asked them to do so directly.

When it comes to Bianka, her reticence to commit to anything in the beginning initially seemed rather levelheaded. Why would she fall in love instantly with some guy she’d never met? Smart! I’m doubting this performance more and more each week. I suspect she’s a sham, constructed from the plastic reality she continues to throw herself into – just a vacuous expanse of “ums” and “I don’t knows”, all of it feigned reluctance disguising what seems like the true ulterior motive: fame. As for Whitney? “I just don’t know if I’m actually ready for — if this is actually what I really want,” she blubbered into her iPhone down the line to her sister. But how easy it seemed for her to wait until after actually getting a rose and assuring herself a spot in the final two before telling Brad any of it. Is her competitive streak that strong? Or is she just Queen Manipulator? Hard, stubborn, fake, and ultimately very boring – Whitney has a silicone personality to match everything else.

And yet, and yet, and yet…

Perhaps I’m being too harsh. Maybe, like I pointed out with Laura B, we’re all entitled to a bit of a breakdown of logic and the giving in to emotional (coastal) waves that blind us and override our sense of self, self-worth, or self-respect. Are these three any less forgivable for being immensely frustrating? Probably not. They’re human, after all. Maybe Brad is all talk and, as you suggest, Sonya, isn’t ready for anything other than the chase.

Or maybe, as you say, Aaron, Brad’s just an idiot. Maybe they’re all idiots.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/television/macleans-bachelor-panel-week-6/feed/1Who wants to marry a Senator’s son?http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/who-wants-to-marry-a-senators-son/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/who-wants-to-marry-a-senators-son/#commentsFri, 12 Oct 2012 18:20:01 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=302238Sen. Larry Smith will feature in an episode of The Bachelor, starring his son Brad

While Justin Trudeau, son of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, was attempting to put the moves on the country last week, Brad Smith, son of Conservative Sen. Larry Smith, was putting the moves on a bevy of young women as the star of The Bachelor Canada. It is difficult to say which of the two scions is nicer to look at.

Smith, a CFL free agent, is the star of the first Canadian version of the successful American TV franchise.

In the premiere episode, Smith was presented with 25 single women, nine of whom were dismissed before they had a chance to get comfortable in the Bachelor mansion. Smith, suitably square-jawed and broad-shouldered, will spend the next few weeks whittling down his options until only one potential future Mrs. Brad Smith remains. The official previews promise generous amounts of crying and drama.

Sen. Smith will also feature in a future episode—presumably when the final girls are brought home to meet the parents. Larry Smith was appointed to the Senate in December 2010 on the recommendation of Stephen Harper. He stepped down temporarily to run as the Conservative candidate in Lac-Saint-Louis, Que., last year and was reappointed to the Senate after finishing third. The senator is a former player, executive and commissioner in the CFL.

To be fair to Brad, handling eight people—men or women—vying for your attention in a small champagne-soaked hotel room in New Orleans, only hours after each of them has given you a private burlesque performance would probably be a bit much for anyone to manage. And to his credit, under the circumstances, he seemed to deal with it fairly well—all episode, in fact. He even managed to deal with Melissa Marie P (for ‘Playboy,’ presumably)’s unstoppable barrage of impatient attempts at getting him into a very serious and heavy conversation about how much he, the Bachelor, does or does not want to love parenthood.

He also handled Laura B’s unexpected breakdown near the end, where she seemed to become suddenly enveloped in some seriously crushing self-doubt, to the point where she was worried Brad would eventually come to realize how boring she is. This struck me as an odd, if somewhat endearing, admission, considering how little we all know about Brad so far. To this point, he’s effectively a waxen figurine the producers cart around to North American vacation destinations so they have an excuse to get a bunch of girls drunk and competitive. That is to say, he’s not so compelling, either, as of yet. Dry your eyes, Laura B.

Anyway, what’s great about reality TV is how quickly we have to get to know—and distinguish between—characters. Whitney is clearly the villain, Gabrielle is the more likeable underdog villain-in-waiting, and Chantelle is obviously the girl from that My Little Pony commercial you saw in the ’80s. I think in the same way that anyone else might be on this show, Melissa Marie was trying to carve out an identity—one that’s perhaps closer to “Single Mom” than “Playboy Model.” But she failed in doing that. Why?

Because she was annoying, yes. But, oh, can’t it be because of something more?

There’s this Marshall McLuhan quote I think of when I see reality TV, where he was talking about how technology (read: TV) changes how people think about themselves. Show business, he said, “has become one way of establishing identity by just put-ons, and without the put-on you’re a nobody.” I don’t know what Melissa Marie’s put-on was, but I don’t think she had one and I think that was her ultimate undoing. I think she just misunderstood what this was all about. I’d also guess Michelle V (of the end-of-show I-just-want-someone-to-love-me confessional) didn’t either. Laura B has no idea who she is, let alone probably any idea of how to adopt yet another identity on top of the one she already has, but she hung in there, bless her. Ana? She’s like a Wedding Crashers persona: Haunted Past.

I find myself again coming back to Bianka, who is still perhaps the most interesting one of them all, in some ways. The dark horse, I think. Or Supervillain?

And what kind of guy is Brad, anyway? Do we have any idea? I was surprised that after so much apparent love (and many tongue-diving kisses) for Whitney, he chose Laura B and Chantelle for his roses. Does this mean he sees through it all?

I demand answers and postmodern one-liners.

From: Sonya To: Aaron, Colin

All right, Colin. Here you go. It’s Larry McCaffrey, musing about The Bachelor Canada‘s product placement, as far as I can tell: “This is the postmodern desert inhabited by people who are, in effect, consuming themselves in the form of images and abstractions through which their desires, sense of identity, and memories are replicated and then sold back to them as products.”

Squeezed between the Whitney vs. Gabi trash talk this week, we saw eight bachelorettes shave their legs with Schick Hydro Silk razors, Brad and Ana lounge on HBC blankets drinking Molson Canadian and Whitney throw a fit over the apparently significant brand names of the dress and necklace that Brad gives to Laura B.

Leg shaving. Jewel ogling. That dazed remark about how the long-stem rose lying on the table “actually has a really long stem.” This week’s episode of Survivor: Vancouver Island was no victory for womankind.

With one exception. The bachelorette I enjoyed most this week—and it seems I disagree with Colin here—was Melissa Marie. That bad attitude. That bitterness. She’s Canada’s own Kristen Stewart! This episode desperately needed Melissa, with her concerns about Brad’s suitability as a step-father, as a contrast to the bachelorette mentality that Brad is, undeniably, The One. At the end of each perfect, romantic date he had this episode, we’re hearing words like “meant to be.” Finally, of Melissa, he said: “This one is going downhill with no brakes.” That. That is a realistic dating experience. I am sad to see her go.

Looking ahead, I think the one to watch is The Vein in Whitney’s Head, most prominently seen in HD during the rose ceremony when Whitney’s archrival Gabi was given a rose before her. “I’m definitely a person who refuses to lose,” Whitney told the cameras earlier in the episode, while being handed the keys to a Ferrari and told that if she drives it the fastest, she’ll win a one-on-one date with Brad. (She succeeded.) We’ve established that Brad might not have been ready to become a step-dad to Melissa’s daughter. Is he ready to become guardian to The Vein?

For that matter, will we ever know anything about Brad?? I’ll turn that over to Aaron.

From: Aaron To: Sonya, Colin

Brad is but a mirror. In his large, straight and perfectly white teeth, these women see themselves and are made to confront who they really are.

To be honest, I kind of want to just skip ahead to the season finale when the producers will announce that they’ve already started shooting a Canadian version of The Bachelorette and that Chantelle is the star. I am completely and hopelessly in love with the idea of watching a reality TV show about this woman.

Let’s review the basics. Chantelle is a pastor from Alberta who giggles at everything and looks like Anna Faris‘ long lost twin. Also, she is a virgin. This last bit she confessed in this week’s episode to Melissa Marie, the Playboy model and single mother. Chantelle and Melissa Marie are friends who bonded in the first episode over Melissa Marie’s ability to identify fake breasts. I’m pretty sure, in addition to watching Chantelle as the bachelorette, I would also watch a buddy comedy starring Chantelle and Melissa Marie.

Chantelle is cute. This is the word Brad uses to describe her, repeatedly. Not “cute” like “I want to make out with you,” but “cute” as in “look at that adorable puppy.” I fear this means Chantelle won’t last much longer than a few more weeks, but I’m pretty sure these weeks are going to constitute an epic, giggly, morality play that begs us to consider deep questions about the human soul.

At the start of this week’s episode, Chantelle was one of eight women selected to accompany Brad to the “Big Easy.” (None of the women could figure out where the Big Easy was. Guesses included: a mountain, something to do with surfing and New York.) Once in New Orleans, the women were ordered to don skimpy outfits and perform a burlesque dance for Brad. Brad attempted to explain this as a test of character (something about going with the flow and being spontaneous). And this, of course, constituted a moral crisis for Chantelle. She was concerned about the kids in her youth group seeing this, but obviously torn. “‘i’m a woman of faith,” she explained, “but I’m also someone who wants to fall in love.” There is a lot going on in that sentence. The producers liked this line enough that they played it three times. What they cut out was the rest of the sentence. In full, it should read, “I’m a woman of faith, but I’m also someone who wants to fall in love, so I’m now going to dance provocatively on national television for a man I’ve barely met as part of a reality television show that has a very poor track record of leading people to lasting and enduring love.”

Let’s be serious for a moment: Can anyone rationally participate in something like this with any rational expectation of finding true love? You can maybe tell yourself that this is as good a way as any of finding your soulmate. But ultimately, somewhere deep inside, you have to know this is a lark. A silly thing that might be fun and, hey, who knows, you might fall in love and then you’ll have a hilarious story to tell your children someday (and the excruciating video to prove it). Anything above and beyond that is some kind of, as McLuhan might say, a put-on. That’s all this is, right?

But here’s the thing: Chantelle seems like the most sincerest person in the whole world. She is purity personified (and not just because of the whole not-having-had-the-sex thing). And now here she is in this fun house of mirrors. I fear for her. I cheer for her. I suspect this will all end badly and then she will be rewarded with her own TV contract. And then I will watch that show.

3. We now know more about the cyclist killed in Edmonton on Monday by a cement truck. Isaak Kornelsen was a track and field athlete at the University of Alberta who ran both middle and long distances. He founded a philosophy club in high school and was the valedictorian. Rest in peace.

4. The McMaster Marauders are once again ranked first by the Football Reporters of Canada. They’re followed by Laval Rouge, Calgary Dinos, Montreal Carabins, Western Mustangs, Queen’s Gaels, UBC Thunderbirds, Saskatchewan Huskies, Acadia Axemen and the Windsor Lancers.

5. Michael Rafferty, the man who murdered eight-year-old Ontario girl Victoria Stafford in 2009, was still showing up in the dating site of Plenty of Fish until Tuesday. His image was attached to a profile belonging to someone named “scoobmike,” purportedly from Saskatoon, Sask. Very creepy.

6. A Jewish student at Michigan State University says he was the victim of an anti-Semitic hate crime at a party where his jaw was broken and his mouth was stapled shut. Police deny the attack was a hate crime, but the student says he endured anti-Semitic chants and Nazi salutes before the attack.

8. Five of the women who will appear on The Bachelor Canada this fall have been revealed. They include a pastor from Alberta, a Playboy bunny from Vancouver and a university recruiter from Moncton, N.B. They will compete for CFL free agent Brad Smith on the Citytv reality show.

9. Residents of New Orleans hunkered down as Hurricane Isaac made landfall nearby on the seventh anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which killed more than 1,500 people.

10. A zoo in New Brunswick says a 19-year-old squirrel monkey named Hercules was stolen overnight and zookeepers are worried. The RCMP are investigating.

Q: Why do you say it’s “bulls–t” that viewer demand has created the deluge of reality TV?A: Michael Hirschorn, the brain trust behind VH1’s Flavor of Love and Flavor of Love: Charm School and basically the guy who is responsible for bringing the modern minstrel show to television, has said in an interview that – this is the quote, “If women don’t want those shows they wouldn’t get made,” That’s what I call bulls–t, because what reality producers and what the entertainment press sells us is this notion that we, the public, have just demanded via massive ratings that they give us this bottom-feeder low-quality reality TV fare, and this is just a big lie. It’s true that some reality shows—American Idol, The Bachelor—have gotten high ratings, but many others languish with paltry ratings and they get to stay [on air] because these shows are really cheap to produce. It can cost about 50 per cent less—sometimes even 75 per cent less—to make a reality show than to make a quality scripted program.

Q: And they can also get advertisers to pay big money for stealth product placement.A: People think that product placement is just a Coke can or a Coke cup on the desk at American Idol. But advertisers can pay millions of dollars per episode to integrate their products into the casting choices, the plot development, the dialogue, the scenery, the “challenges” of shows. Take The Apprentice, which has gotten upwards of $2 million per episode from a variety of Fortune 500 type companies to integrate into the challenges, so every episode is basically one long infomercial for Sony and Chrysler and candy bars and cars and sneakers. Some seasons The Apprentice has done very well in the ratings, and other seasons it’s done so poorly that NBC cancelled it. But then they hired a new entertainment division president, Ben Silverman, and he happened to be a former reality TV producer. He was one of the people responsible for producing a show called The Restaurant. NBC paid not one dime to create that show, it was created by a reality TV production company that works with advertisers to create content that advertisers want people to see, and then they gave that show, for free, to NBC. So NBC didn’t invest anything; they were just able to sell commercials. So Ben Silverman gets to NBC, realizes that The Apprentice was a cash cow even though the ratings had plummeted, reversed the decision to cancel The Apprentice, and then turned it into The Celebrity Apprentice, sprinkled D-list fairy dust on it and brought it back. Was it because people, the public, really wanted that show? No, it was plummeting in the ratings every single season since it debuted. Now it’s back because Silverman, a reality TV stealth advertising fan, decided that it was too cheap and too lucrative to let go.

Q: Do most people understand that what they’re watching is completely manufactured?A: If you ask most people, “Do you think reality TV is real?” they’ll say, “Oh, no, no, I know it’s fake”—but in the next breath they’ll say, “Oh, but that bitch needed to get eliminated,” or, “Oh, but that guy was such a douchebag.” Well, if you think you know anything about any of the people you’ve seen on reality shows, you don’t know that the shows are not real. These shows aren’t any more real than Mad Men, without the cool clothes. But Mad Men, at least, is intentionally scripted to have a running critical commentary about the sexism and racism of the ’50s and early ’60s within the advertising industry.

Q: You argue that we need to readjust our definition of “scripted.”A: Scripting doesn’t happen in the traditional sense of actors being given a 30-page manifesto to memorize. It starts with casting. Producers find people with addiction problems or anger problems, and think, “This will make great TV.” Women who are Mensa members or high achievers tend not to be cast. Women who are either sincerely “looking for their Prince Charming” or sincerely feeling down on their luck do. After casting, they then edit people into stock characters: the dumb bimbo, the catty bitch, the weepy loser who says, “I’m going to die alone if the bachelor doesn’t choose me!” For women of colour those stock characters are even more extreme. Editing is the predominant way that scripting happens. People don’t understand that for every 45 minutes of The Bachelor they see, more than 100 hours of film have been shot.

Q: You write about “Frankenbites,” the industry term for splicing various conversations together to create a fraudulent new one.A: One of the most controversial scenes on any reality show was in Joe Millionaire. Viewers watched about five minutes of trees in the dark, nothingness. But what you heard were things like, “Do you think it would go better lying down?” And there were captions like “slurp” and “mmm.” Those bits of conversation were from an entirely different day. I’ll give you another example. One of the only Asian women who’d ever appeared on The Bachelor was a medical student named Tina Wu. She was recruited by the producers because the bachelor that year was a doctor, so they thought, “Oh, it would be good to have one person, at least, who has his medical stuff in common.” She hadn’t seen the show before, she thought, “Oh, maybe it’ll be a chance to have some fun vacation.” Well, she goes on the show, and she blogged about it in great, great detail—but she ripped that show to shreds. She talked about the psychologists they have behind the scenes who do all these intake interviews, so they knew that she had a very troubled relationship with her family, in particular her father. She hated being on the show, she said that it was filthy, there were rats running around the mansion, that there was very little food and constant alcohol. And she didn’t like the guy; she thought he was kind of boring. She would say on camera that she thought he didn’t really have a good since of humour, because at one point they’re out an a date where there’s big, huge yacht and he says something like, “Welcome to my yacht,” and she laughs about it because she knows that he can’t possibly afford that. She’s like, “Oh, you mean this is your yacht?” in this very kind of ha-ha way, calling attention to the product placement. Then they edit that to make her seem like she’s a dumb-ass and she really believes that this is, you know, “This is your yacht!”

She was edited into the girl who was too closed off, who wouldn’t open up, and that became the thing he would always say to her and other women would always say, “Why aren’t you opening up? You’re too cold.” So at one point she says to the producers on camera: “I’m not opening up because I’m not really interested in him, but being on this show, agreeing to do this show, was the thing I regret most in my life.”

Well, eventually, way, way, way longer into the show than she would have preferred, she eventually gets eliminated. When she finally got eliminated it was about 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning, she said, and she was grinning ear to ear, she was happy to go home. That didn’t play well with producers, and they kept saying to her, “We need you to cry,” and she wasn’t interested in crying, she wasn’t heart-broken. And they told her: “If you don’t show some real emotion here you’re just going to be edited into being, you know, the cold bitch.” And she was happy; she was going home, she didn’t want to cry. So they poke at her and poke at her and poke at her, and she’s still not giving them the tears that they want, so finally… now, imagine you’ve been up since, like, 7:00 in the morning, you’ve been in this high-pressure environment all day, and the producer is saying to you, “Don’t you think your father would be disappointed in you?” or things about your family. That’s where she cried. She felt betrayed that they would exploit her personal back story that way. And so what we saw as viewers was after she gets eliminated we hear her say, “I didn’t open up to the bachelor. This was the biggest regret of my life,” and then she cries. That’s a frankenbite.

Q: Have any contestants taken producers to task for misappropriating what they’ve said?A: They sign away their rights to do so. In these very draconian contracts it says: “We can make a fiction out of you and we most likely will.” It says that in legal language but that’s basically the long and short of it. Not only do people sign away their rights to speak to the press negatively about the shows, they sign away their rights to own the intellectual property of things they create on shows like Project Runway or on American Idol, they sign away their rights to sue if they get injured or even killed on these shows. What these contracts do is they cause a chilling effect, because most people who show up on reality TV shows do so because they are hoping for some sort of big pay-day to change their life, right, so they’re not going to be people who have the kinds of resources to go up against Goliath, so they just don’t say all of the things that have seen happen behind the scenes. You know, they’ll maybe critique, “Oh, I didn’t like the way I was edited on the show,” to Entertainment Weekly or TV Guide, but they won’t say, “Here exactly is how they manipulate reality so that what you’re seeing is absolutely not real.”

Q: Reality shows appear to exist in a bubble, completely disconnected from social reality.A: Absolutely. At the same time you have a housing bubble in America and the highest unemployment rate since the Depression, you’re seeing television shows encouraging us to root for massive profits for real estate speculators and house-flippers on shows like Million Dollar Listing and Flip that House. And at the same time as women are making great strides in politics, in business, and redefining personal relationships within the family, within parenting, within sexual communication and relationships, on television, in the guise of reality, producers have expected us to believe that women have no ambition, they want us to believe that women not only have no real choices, they don’t even want any. So in that way, with shows like Wife Swap in which every woman who works outside the home is pitted against a stay-at-home mom, or pitted against a woman who may work outside the home but doesn’t really want to, only has to, and all the women who actually like their careers are considered bad mothers, and all the women who stay at home are considered doormats. What I want people to understand is that this massive stereotyping, the massive regressive depictions of womanhood, of women being stupid, of women being less competent than men, of women being catty, vindictive and not to be trusted especially by other women, of women being gold diggers, all of these ideas are very much a product of reality TV producers and networks wanting to revive 1950s ideology for the contemporary age. These shows aren’t any more real than Mad Men, without the cool clothes, but Mad Men, at least, is intentionally scripted to have a running critical commentary about the sexism and racism of the ’50s and early ’60s within the advertising industry.

Reality TV is showing us the same kind of misogyny but they’re glorifying it and they’re pretending that it’s real. What we see in reality television is the remarkable success of reality TV producers creating a fictitious world and packaging it to us as if it’s reality, a world that the most ardent fundamentalists have always tried to achieve, one in which women’s rightful place is in the home, and women who have independence are scorned and will die alone, and in which the only role for fathers is financial provision and if they are stay-at-home parents they’re wimps and sissies and not real men, a world in which people of colour exist only as male buffoons, thugs and pimps, and female whores and the Jezebel and Sapphire stereotypes. That world is not real, but through all of this frankenbite editing and pick-and-choose and advertisers’ influence over content, we get to see what networks want us to believe about ourselves at the turn of the century: they want us to believe that the women’s movement, the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, never existed. We see no traces of that in reality TV. So just at the same time as women are winning and setting world records in any number of Olympic sports, America’s Next Top Model debuts to tell women that their bodies are specifically here just to be decorative, and the thinner and weaker the better. At the same time as Condoleezza Rice is becoming national security advisor, Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire is telling us that the biggest ambition that we can have is to be chosen in a sort of mail-order-bride/Miss America parade to get married to somebody we don’t even know in a network-arranged marriage. And that’s just not what life is like in America anymore. The age of first marriage keeps rising, people are staying single longer, the number of two-parent families where both parents work is rising because of economic conditions. The ideology of this world that we see on television is very specifically political, it’s very regressive, and it’s very intentional.

Q: You give the example of a black woman being axed from Real Housewives of Atlanta because she didn’t fit producers’ stereotypes.A: What’s interesting with The Real Housewives of Atlanta is when you see how reality producers tweak formulas to reinforce ethnic stereotypes. The original real housewives were of Orange County, and they were depicted as blondes, bimbos, elite wealthy snob elitists. And then it went to New York where they still had a lot of the snobbery but there was a bit more of a sort of east coast flair to it, and then we have Atlanta where all of a sudden the notion is because it’s black women all of a sudden there are physical fist fights, and there’s intimidation, and people are scared of one another, and there’s consent screaming and altercations. The running subtext is “these people” are low class and no amount of money can change their inherent nature.”

That first season, DeShawn Snow, was a divinity student, she was studying for, I believe, a Ph.D., she headed a foundation for girls’ empowerment, But we never saw her studying. The fact that this was a studious, intelligent woman who was a religious person, who wanted to empower young girls, especially girls of colour, the only thing we ever saw about her foundation was as an excuse for her to have problems throwing a party and people being snubbed because they weren’t invited to the party. And the reason we didn’t get to see her cracking open the books and studying is because that would interrupt the narrative they wanted to present about black women, that narrative being that black women are ignorant and illiterate. For example, they didn’t show us DeShawn studying but they did show us NeNe Leakes not being able to help her son with math and having to get her husband to tutor him because she doesn’t know which is bigger, a third of a half . When they dropped her from the series it was because—they specifically told her—“You don’t fly off the handle the way we need you to. Next season we’re going to be amping up the drama even more and we just don’t think you have it in you.” So then the next season she was out, and who did they bring in? A woman who they edited – a hip-hop star – who they edited as basically ‘ghetto,’ and they called her ghetto over and over and over, and then they spent a lot of time on her relationship with her fiancé who had numerous kids from different mothers.

Q: A catfight does generate more interest.A: By no means am I saying that these shows aren’t compelling. They are. They basically offer all of the sniping and gossip and voyeurism of high school cliques and office gossip without feeling like we’re affecting any real people. And if we’re questioning whether or not we’re being the best parents we can be, well, at least our families aren’t self-destructing like Jon and Kate’s. But [the appeal is] not just schadenfreude—there’s a lot of humour. That’s the biggest draw of Jersey Shore, that people behave ridiculously and it’s funny to watch. The bigger question is why there’s such a huge appetite for this prurient kind of thing. When this genre burst onto the scene with Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?, there was the hugest public outcry: “Oh my God, this is so regressive.” Ten years later it’s a very different climate. News outlets basically just repeat the same big lies that reality TV producers sell.

Q: And now Jon and Kate are “news,” the argument being that people are interested.A: Why do you have pictures of Snooki and Bachelorette Ali Fedotowsky and Kate Gosselin on the covers of all the tabloids? Well, because it’s so much cheaper. I’ve already talked about how much cheaper it is to run an unscripted show versus a scripted show, but think about the tabloid level: If you pay a paparazzi for a photo of Snooki you’re paying only a few bucks. If you pay a paparazzi for a photo of Angelina Jolie—and it’s a good photo—that’s a very pricy picture. It goes back to money. Same reason why CNN can run endless amounts of, “What’s wrong with Lindsay Lohan? Should she get help? Is she ever going to beat her drug addiction?” stories ad nauseam, because you pay some guy to videotape Lindsay walking around or getting in and out of her car, tape Paris Hilton getting in and out of her car and hopefully catching a crotch shot, you pay them a few hundred bucks and you’ve got your story for the entire day, and maybe even repeatedly through the entire week.

That is much cheaper than stationing, for example, a whole foreign bureau in Afghanistan to make sure that you’ve got, every single day, new coverage of civilian deaths or of whatever the new battle is. You don’t have to pay translators, you don’t have to pay videographers, you don’t have to pay numerous reporters, you don’t have to pay security personnel to keep them safe, you don’t have to pay their lodging and their travel, you just have to throw a few hundred bucks to a paparazzi who maybe gets Lindsay looking dazed or Paris without underwear and then you’ve got your CNN or your Fox story for the next half hour or for the next five days. Same thing for the tabloids, right? So again they will say, “This is what we want,” and it’s not that people won’t buy it. That’s key. People are buying it, I’m not saying nobody wants it, I’m saying people would also want quality, funny, interesting programming if we were given that option. A lot of the reason people aren’t watching scripted shows that are quality options is because those shows get yanked off the air before they can develop an audience. A show like Cheers, longest-running sit-com, would not get the chance to develop in today’s market.

There’s often a massively financed campaign to get us to believe in the appearance of spontaneous collective interest. For example, Survivor existed to test the new Infinity-Viacom-CBS merger, to test the power of cross-platform promotion. So for months before that show appeared, shock jocks on FM stations would wake people up with, “There’s going to be this show with cute chicks in bikinis eating bugs. You gotta check it out.” And then you could turn to your news station and find Mark Burnett being interviewed about a new format in which advertisers and networks work together to bring us unscripted content, and then when you get home, 60 Minutes was talking about it. Nobody was talking about that show who wasn’t on CBS’s, Viacom’s and Infinity’s payroll. And then there were embedded sponsors, the Survivor logo on Doritos, so it seemed like if you were not watching Survivor, you were missing out on a massive cultural phenomenon.

Q: You watched a thousand hours of reality TV to do this book and you write that not everything is odious. Shows shows like Project Runway or Amazing Race, for instance you, like.
A: I’m really glad that you asked that. People make the mistake of thinking that what I’m saying is that they should absolutely turn the TV off, that they shouldn’t watch any reality shows if they don’t want to be brainwashed, or that they’re bad people if they watch reality TV, and that’s not at all what I’m saying. The problem with reality TV is not the format. You can do interesting, compelling, and non-bigoted things with the format of unscripted television, but that requires intentionality. There are a few shows here and there that have been actually quite edifying, a show like Project Runway that focuses mostly on talent, that focuses on people creating something out of nothing under tight deadlines with very few limited resources and odd materials. I think I call it in the book “Macgyver meets Milan.” That show tends to celebrate people’s differences as opposed to pitting people against each other based on difference, and that is an intentional part of their narrative. But people were wondering why this season of Project Runway seems to feature so much more back-biting and arguing and—to some degree—stereotyping than we’ve seen on many seasons before.

I was not surprised by this at all because now that it’s on Lifetime it’s a different set of producers: it’s Bunim/Murray Productions who created The Real World. I was worried as soon as I heard that Bunim Murray was going to take over Project Runway that the narrative would shift. And they know they can’t shift it too much because it’s a success based on this talent-over-everything-else mould that has been created by Bravo over the years for that show, but they have built in more stereotyping this season; they have built in more arguing and more contestants yelling at each other, etc. And so again when you see the differences there you realize producers really decide how people are going to behave and what kinds of narratives occur. But in general, the reason so many people love Project Runway is because it’s not based on humiliation, it’s based on validating artistic endeavour.

Q: Explain why you see a link between the [U.S.] Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the shrinking size of actresses.A: Telecom ’96 happens [and] media companies merge at a much faster rate than ever before, and we see the introduction of really cheap-to-produce tabloids, both print and TV, that do very little more than follow celebrity women around shaming them about their bodies. All of these “Baby Bump?” arrows pointing at bellies, when somebody basically ate a bagel that day. This was not the case when media companies cared about profit but also, in a measured way, about the quality of their content. So in the ’80s you had shows like Beverly Hills 90210, in which the girls basically looked like thin but healthy young women. Fast forward after Telecom ’96 to the current show 90210—almost every single girl looks unhealthily skinny.

Q: Why do you say violence against women is part of the subtext and text of reality shows?A: Violence against women has always been part of the subtext and also part of the text of reality TV on networks, since 2000. That first show, Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire, the guy who was considered the crown prince had a restraining order against him. Flavor Flav [of The Flavor of Love] has had charges against him for domestic violence, and yet he gets three seasons of a dating show. And then you have shows like America’s Next Top Model, which in the long and storied tradition of fashion and beauty advertisers have repeatedly used images of women in fear, in pain, and even in coffins, and in beautiful corpse challenges in which they’re supposed to pose as gorgeous, glamorous dead girls, murder victims, while judges say things like, “Beautiful, gorgeous! You look great dead.” So what are we to make of season after season after season of beautiful corpses and Tyra Banks telling girls, “Pose as if you’re in pain. Think pain but beauty.” You remember, I’m sure: in Canada this was a big thing—two summers ago where Ryan Jenkins got voted off the show Megan Wants a Millionaire, went home—where he was positioned, by the way, on that show as great boyfriend relationship material—went home, married his ex-girlfriend, Jasmine Fiore—she was a model—married her, and then allegedly killed her and mutilated her body so badly that she was only able to be identified through the serial numbers on her breast implants, and then killed himself. People at that time called me, lots of reporters called me and said, “Has reality TV created a monster?” No, they did not create a monster, they cast a monster, and they should have known that they were casting a monster because he had a record for domestic violence.

And the thing that that says is that reality producers tend to rank women’s safety lower on their priority list than lighting and the provision of alcohol and set design. And the idea to women at home that these people are princes among men, that these people are worthy of being fought over, says basically as long as a guy has a firm ass and a firm financial portfolio he doesn’t need to be respectful, he doesn’t need to be smart, he doesn’t need to be loyal, he doesn’t need to be funny, he doesn’t need to be a good partner, and even at the baseline he doesn’t need to treat you with any kind of physical dignity, he can be a batterer, and you should still fight over him because he can bring you the bling.

Q: Is reality programming the new reality?A: If we continue to allow media companies to let market forces define everything to the point where quality means nothing and the economics behind production is 100 per cent of the priority, then every season will have more provocative, more bigoted fare. For example, Bridalplasty is about to debut: cosmetic surgery given to brides who compete to get procedures while they plan their wedding. We’ve had Extreme Makeover, The Swan. So what can they do to make it even more disgusting? Oh, let’s merge the wedding-industrial-complex shows with the cosmetic-surgery-is-liberating-for-women shows. They have to go further and further, more racist, more misogynistic, more over-the-top. We will see more of that if we don’t become very critical very quickly.